Escalating Effects of Software Technical and Ethical Debt and Improvement Through Design Discipline and Social Constructs

James Wessel

Download Paper | Permalink

Conference: 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Publication Date: June 22, 2025
Start Date: June 22, 2025
End Date: August 15, 2025
Conference Session: Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering Division (TELPhE) Technical Session 3
Tagged Division: Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering Division (TELPhE)
Page Count: 13
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/56439

Paper Authors

biography

James Wessel Franciscan University of Steubenville (FUS)

visit author page

James Wessel possesses over 40 years of major software development and acquisition management experience among varied DoD services and industry partners, providing expert consultation in software engineering best practice within major software intensive system program settings. This includes the emergent software engineering areas of the Cloud, Agile, Digital Engineering, DevSecOps and Cybersecurity.
James Wessel has been a member of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI) for over the past 19 years. During this period he also provided software engineering instruction for Franciscan University of Steubenville students for over 9 years. Prior to the SEI, Mr. Wessel provided software system acquisition management support within U.S. Army Program Executive Offices and research programs as a MITRE Corporation employee. Prior to this period he worked within the energy sector. Mr. Wessel holds a MS degree in Software Engineering.

visit author page

Download Paper | Permalink

Abstract

As the exponential pace of technology continues to escalate, sadly so has technical debt and its counterpart ethical debt. This paper describes these persistent issues which negatively affect societies at a global level, with a focus upon software engineering design methods to expose and prevent these harmful debts early in the development lifecycle. As the users of software technologies are consequentially affected, social constructs are proposed to provide a feedback loop to both the developer and the consumer communities to better ensure continuous acceptable technical and ethical product quality. A historical review of technical and ethical debt concerns and their relationship is provided, with a focus upon the continuous tension between design rigor and time to market pressures. In terms of impacts, runaway modern day technical debt damages have been estimated at over $2.41 trillion. A recent example was a major global Automotive firm that had a large recall due to a safety related software problem in its cars. The cars were recalled and software updated at great expense, only to realize that the replacement software had not fixed the original problem and had new flaws. Clearly software industry investments to help prevent this type of phenomenon should pay substantial dividends. The need for a more disciplined, engineering approach to identify and balance (e.g., tradeoff) technical and ethical attributes has been lamented. The proficient application of advanced design quality verification methodologies has shown to improve design quality and thus improved product performance for prioritized qualities. Including ethical quality attributes into the design verification process can reduce the probability of both technical and ethical debt. Software development tool sets can be leveraged to assist in the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach. These design methodologies should be strongly incorporated in education processes, software design guidelines and standards. Lastly the software development and user communities need to better organize awareness of this technology blight. The consumer community, independent agencies and government bodies can mount efforts to put a public spotlight upon these forms of software capability development malpractice resulting the mass distribution of harmful digital products.

Citation
Format

Wessel, J. (2025, June), Escalating Effects of Software Technical and Ethical Debt and Improvement Through Design Discipline and Social Constructs Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . https://peer.asee.org/56439

TY - CPAPER
AB - As the exponential pace of technology continues to escalate, sadly so has technical debt and its counterpart ethical debt. This paper describes these persistent issues which negatively affect societies at a global level, with a focus upon software engineering design methods to expose and prevent these harmful debts early in the development lifecycle. As the users of software technologies are consequentially affected, social constructs are proposed to provide a feedback loop to both the developer and the consumer communities to better ensure continuous acceptable technical and ethical product quality. A historical review of technical and ethical debt concerns and their relationship is provided, with a focus upon the continuous tension between design rigor and time to market pressures. In terms of impacts, runaway modern day technical debt damages have been estimated at over $2.41 trillion. A recent example was a major global Automotive firm that had a large recall due to a safety related software problem in its cars. The cars were recalled and software updated at great expense, only to realize that the replacement software had not fixed the original problem and had new flaws. Clearly software industry investments to help prevent this type of phenomenon should pay substantial dividends.
The need for a more disciplined, engineering approach to identify and balance (e.g., tradeoff) technical and ethical attributes has been lamented. The proficient application of advanced design quality verification methodologies has shown to improve design quality and thus improved product performance for prioritized qualities. Including ethical quality attributes into the design verification process can reduce the probability of both technical and ethical debt. Software development tool sets can be leveraged to assist in the effectiveness and efficiency of this approach. These design methodologies should be strongly incorporated in education processes, software design guidelines and standards. Lastly the software development and user communities need to better organize awareness of this technology blight. The consumer community, independent agencies and government bodies can mount efforts to put a public spotlight upon these forms of software capability development malpractice resulting the mass distribution of harmful digital products.

AU - James Wessel
CY - Montreal, Quebec, Canada
DA - 2025/06/22
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Escalating Effects of Software Technical and Ethical Debt and Improvement Through Design Discipline and Social Constructs
UR - https://peer.asee.org/56439
ER -